Hands-On Exploration of Parallelism for Absolute Beginners with Scratch

As the importance of parallel and distributed computing (PDC) continues to increase, there is great need to introduce core PDC topics very early in the study of computer science. Even students with absolutely no prior programming experience, and perhaps little expectation of long-term computer science study, need hands-on level-appropriate experience with PDC topics in order to be well-educated in computing today. This paper illustrates how to use the Scratch programming language to introduce parallelism concepts, including the use of parallelism and communication for clean solutions, race conditions, blocking and non-blocking commands, shared versus private variables, and producer-consumer algorithms.